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Saws

If you can’t cut wood, you can’t build furniture. That’s where saws come in. From antique woodworking hand tools like backsaws and coping saws to the latest table saws on the market, you’ve found the right spot for reliable information on cutting wood. Whether you’re looking to hone your hand tool techniques or learn about smart jigs for your table saw, band saw or miter saw, you’ll find it here.

If you read this blog regularly, you should be sick of this suggestion: Buy Pégas coping saw blades. Hoard them. I do – and I’m not generally a hoarder. I have about 150 stashed away in case Pegas doubles the price or stops making them this well. I don’t have evidence that either event...

My dovetails are always at their best if I warm up before sawing. But I’ll be honest – when I am pressed for time I have no patience to cut an entire joint, much less prep the wood for a practice set. So here are two things I do to get my sawing on...

While teaching in England this summer I had a sudden and miraculous encounter with Pégas coping saw blades – and I am a convert. I rarely say this sort of thing, but here we go: Buy them. Buy as many as you can afford. Encourage the company to make more blades like this. If...

I pretty much eat coping saw blades for breakfast. Just about every piece of casework I do involves dovetails (sometimes more than 100 in a single piece such as a tool chest), so a coping saw is almost always on the bench to remove waste. For years I have used the Olson coping saw...

Shannon Rogers of the Hand Tool School brought along his 48”-long Roubo frame saw to the Saturday meeting of the Chesapeake chapter of the Society of American Furniture Makers, explained its details and (most importantly) let us try it out during lunch. It was so effortless to use (as long as you used your...

When I started work at Popular Woodworking in 1996, the goal was to cram as many projects into each issue as possible. No techniques. No tool reviews. Just 17 to 20 projects. Oh, and we couldn’t use outside authors to help. As a result, we were building all day, everyday. And we were always...

The newest book from Popular Woodworking Books, “Handsaw Essentials” has my name on the cover. But that’s really a marketing move that you should ignore. The book is a quite good compilation of all the saw stuff that has appeared in Popular Woodworking and Woodworking Magazine during the last decade . There’s great articles...

In the Saw Storage chapter for “Handsaw Essentials,” I would have liked to include this sawtill that Samuel Peterson built; it was featured in the August 2000 issue of Popular Woodworking. Alas, the files are so old that I would have had to send out slides for scans and rekey the text. And I...

I’m busy trying to tie up the loose ends and a few empty columns in our forthcoming book “Handsaw Essentials” (which should be available by the end of October). It’s a collection of (almost) everything we’ve written on blog posts and in Popular Woodworking and Woodworking Magazine on meat-powered saws and sawing over the...